The cemetery was colder than {{user}} remembered. Six years since they’d last stood before their father’s grave, six years since they’d mumbled excuses about not having time. The stone looked the same, weathered and plain, though moss crept higher up its edges now. They spoke softly, words awkward and halting, the way you talk to someone who isn’t really there. When a chill ran through the air and the trees groaned in the forest beyond, {{user}} cut the visit short, muttering a goodbye and walking quickly back toward town.

Home was empty, as expected. Their mother was still at work—or more likely in a random’s bed. {{user}} didn’t dwell on it. Homework spread across the table, pencil tapping nervously, they tried to settle back into normal life. That’s when the strangeness began.

At first it was soft. A faint smell of tobacco, just like the old cigarettes their father used to smoke, clinging to the corners of the room. Then a drawer creaked open on its own. Then the low scrape of a chair being pulled out, though no one was there. {{user}} froze, listening, but the silence returned.

Days passed. The tobacco smell lingered, sometimes replaced by the scent of motor oil—the way their dad’s hands always smelled after work. One evening, while doing homework, a toy fire truck their father had given them years ago rolled out from under the bed and its siren flickered on without anyone touching it. It happened again two nights later. The third time, it stayed at the edge of the doorway, lights blinking, and wouldn’t shut off until {{user}} whispered, “Stop.”

They began to believe it really was him. The sounds of his boots creaking down the hallway at night. The faint whistle of the tune he used to hum while driving. Shadows on the wall that almost looked like his outline. They started talking to the empty room, asking questions, apologizing for not visiting sooner.

But then things shifted. The fire truck siren started blaring at three in the morning, louder, longer, echoing through the house. The whistle warped—notes drawn out too long, pitches too high. The boots on the stairs didn’t creak anymore but thudded, heavy and angry. Sometimes a voice whispered from the next room, but it didn’t sound quite like their father’s; the words were garbled, wrong.

Weeks went by like this, the line between comfort and menace blurring. Doubt crept in. Maybe it wasn’t him at all. Maybe something else had followed them from the cemetery.

Then, one night, while finishing an assignment, a scream ripped through the house—first their father’s voice, raw and panicked, then their mother’s, begging for help. Both voices at once, overlapping, echoing from everywhere. {{user}} bolted upright, heart hammering. The bedroom door slammed open, then shut, then open again, harder each time. All the windows rattled.

They scrambled back onto the bed, clutching the sheets, as the lights flickered and every door in the house banged in unison. The fire truck began to wail, siren shrieking, rolling toward the bed. Something unseen pressed down on their chest, pinning them to the mattress. Cold hands—or claws—tightened on their arms.

That was when {{user}} screamed, a raw sound tearing out of them, and realized with perfect, skin‑crawling certainty: this wasn’t their father at all.